#from the queen of dark symbolism
Five years ago, an angel took my mother away from me.
I saw him wrap his great feathered wings tight around her and bring her demons out of the box she had locked them in. The way I remember it, it was her and him at the kitchen table, and between them was a gift that he had brought; a bottle of white wine, complete with a slick black bow around the neck.
It was a gift that never should have been unwrapped.
The angel was cloaked in black rags that seemed to crawl upon his body, as if they were not rags at all, but a putrid infestation of roaches and millipedes, swarming together and wrapping around his frail form to conceal loose hanging flesh. His wings were black too, like the darkest night on a sunless planet; soft like you would imagine the wings of an angel should be, but patchy and greasy, as if they had been slicked with oil.
The kitchen that I had so fondly associated with the scent of brewing coffee now smelled of rum, and sulphur. It was the scent of someone who did not belong; someone who was not welcome. An intruder.
I stood there like one who was lost in a dream. My mother beckoned me forward, excitement written all over her haggard face. “This is my little girl,” she said to the creature. “Doesn’t she look just like me? Everyone says so.”But the angel did not look up; he only had eyes for her.
His face was not beautiful, but old and sickly. His skin did not glisten or glow with the light of God, and I could tell that no such light had ever touched him. Where his eyes should have been, there was nothing; two soulless black holes on his withered face. You could look into them and become truly lost, but not in the romantic sense. You could lose yourself.
“Come closer, sweetheart! Don’t be afraid. He says he’s going to make the bad thoughts go away; so many terrible things, and you want mama to be happy, don’t you? He’s going to help me forget.”
He took her then, and as he did, I saw the light leave her eyes; but it was not like the stories describe it. He kept her alive, but she didn’t breathe the same. He ripped out her lungs and replaced them with two empty wine bladders. Now she seeks respiration at the bottom of a bottle.
My mom’s eyes used to be warmer; lit up by the love she had for her friends and her family and for life itself. They made her the kindest mother that a child could never appreciate enough and the brightest beacon in a room full of people plagued with sadness.
Now I look in her eyes and see the same vacant blackness as those of the creature that claimed her.
She broke promises she had made with herself and cut ties with every moral she had held so close to her heart. She forgot the language of love and optimism until the only thing that fell from her lips were lies and deceit.
And in this way the angel stayed with us for five years, wearing the skin of someone I loved.
I suppose I will always love her, though not in the way a daughter must love her mother. I’ll love her like a old memory; something that left a long time ago. Something good and pure and untouched by sin.
She overdosed on the floor of a cheap motel room, and the angel was the only one there to hold her hand. Four days went by before she was found, and in that time, he sucked the remaining humanity from her hollow lifeless form.
At her visitation there were many people. they spoke of her as if the last five years had never happened; turning a blind eye to her sickness after her death just as they did while she was alive. “She was a good soul whose love knew no bounds,” they said. “and if I shut my eyes tight enough, there’s no conceivable way for me to be persuaded otherwise.”
I remember staring down at her open casket, and the angel stood beside me.
“Is this the end?” I asked him. “Will you leave me in peace?”
“For a while” he replied, speaking for the first time. “But I cannot stay away for long. One day perhaps ten years in the future, when the days run into one another, and the universe has weighed heavy on your back; when the light of the world has lost its lustre, you will call out to me just as your mother did, and I will come to help you too.”
I felt my eyes well up with tears as I saw my future with horrifying clarity, and for all the things I wanted to say, I could only manage the simplest response:
“Why?”
The angel placed his withered hand on my shoulder and spoke with vodka on his breath:
“Because you are so like your mother. Everyone says so.”
